My City of Ruins: Bruce Springsteen e l'utopia fra le rovine

• Autores: Enrico Botta
• Localización: Altre Modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, ISSN-e 2035-7680, Nº. Extra 2, 2011 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Número especial 9/11/2011), págs. 225-236
• Idioma: italiano
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • The paper focuses on My City of Ruins, the song that Bruce Springsteen sang�ten days after the 09/11 terrorist attacks�for "America: A Tribute to Heroes" and that was released in the concept album The Rising in 2002. The essay aims to highlight how the song describes the post 09/11 New York City by opposing the themes of �ruins� and �utopia.� From a textual and musical point of view, My City of Ruins is, in fact, composed of a double structure that balances different feelings: the fear, pain, and loneliness of the victims, in the rock-blues first section; the faith, love, and hope, in the gospel second part. Furthermore, the paper tries to point out how My City of Ruins no longer describes the symbolic ruins of a foreign past�in line with the nineteenth and twentieth-century American cultural tradition of the Grand Tour�but defines the physical signs of a definitively collapsed �American dream,� which can survive only in a utopian and spiritual �Promised Land.�